Like father, like son: Eric Lampman starting bean-to-chocolate business called Blue Bandana

Eric Lampman starting bean-to-chocolate business called Blue Bandana

Jun. 6, 2012

Eric Lampman empties a load of roasted cacao beans before cooling and cracking them open at Blue Bandana Chocolates, a new bean-to-chocolate company in Williston. Eric Lampman is the son of Lake Champlain Chocolates founder Jim Lampman. / Glenn Russell/Burlington Free Press

Written by

Dan D’Ambrosio

Free Press Staff Writer

WILLISTON - — Eric Lampman, 28, shares his father’s square, open features and deep blue eyes. He has just returned from a week in Guatemala, where, along with a consultant named B.K. Matlick, a former cocoa plantation manager for Hershey’s, he met with the Q’eqchi’, an indigenous group growing cocoa in a 56-square-mile region surrounding the Laguna Lachua National Park.

The Q’eqchi’ planted some 70,000 cocoa seeds on 245 acres in 2006, but Lampman was focused on a coop of about 35 members at Rocja Pontila with 75 acres of cocoa in production. The farmers at Rocja Pontila didn’t have much training, Eric writes in his notes from the trip, and in the first five years their trees only produced about three tons of cocoa beans.

The coop has identified 160 so-called “super trees,” however, that with grafting to less-than-super trees could increase production by tenfold in the next two to three years. Matlick and Lampman were there to train the farmers on how to improve their trees, and possibly to secure the future of Blue Bandana, the bean-to-chocolate business Eric Lampman hopes to launch at the end of July.

The name comes from the blue bandana Lampman snatched one day to put over his nose and mouth when he realized the dust from the primitive cocoa bean roasting operation he was experimenting with in Burlington was giving him a wicked cough.

“That’s one thing we’ve never done here is make the actual chocolate,” Eric said recently at company headquarters on Pine Street. “We’ve purchased it from the professionals of the world.”

Jim Lampman has long had the idea of making his own chocolate from his own cocoa beans, but he needed someone to take the idea and run with it, which turned out to be Eric, his research and development manager. Lampman said he was considering going with his son to Guatemala, until he realized it was a 4 ½-hour ride from Guatemala City into the mountains in a pickup truck.

“Then it was another three hours on really bad roads,” Eric says. “It made me sick one day. A combination of maybe eating a bad ice cube and getting tired of corn tortillas and beans after five days. I got out of the car and felt like I was beat up.”

After a week with the ‘Q-eqchi’ farmers, eating with them, showing them grafting techniques to propagate their super trees, and sleeping in their homes, Lampman came home convinced he might not only have a connection for Blue Bandana, but also for its parent company, Lake Champlain Chocolates.

“It was an unbelievable trip,” he said. “The community is looking for a buyer in time. They’ve got ambitious leaders who want to make it work. There’s a lot of passion. I did extend to them if they have things they’re looking for, or support they need, to speak up. We’re looking to form a partnership. We can’t expect to have cocoa tomorrow or today, but we can grow with them. We’re small.”